Cloud deployment can help ISVs and our joint customers on their journey to digital transformation with lower Total-Cost-of-Ownership, simplified deployment options and accelerated time to value.

In this installment of our continuing ISV (Independent Software Vendor) series, we will build on the SAP HANA foundation laid down by Karl-Heinz Hoffman last week.  In his article, Karl described why now is the time for ISVs to adopt SAP HANA to accelerate their digital transformation. In this installment, I’ll discuss how ISVs can benefit by incorporating a Cloud strategy with SAP HANA powered digital transformation.   If you are interested in learning how you can innovate quicker, reduce both ISV and customer total-cost-of-ownership, and provide a seamless/easy customer deployment experience — then this article is for you.

Recap of Why ISVs should be interested in developing on SAP HANA

Let’s do a quick recap of what Karl brought to us in the first installment.  He showed us how SAP HANA simplifies your environment by providing the ability to store, manage and operate both transactional and analytical stores as a real-time, seamless, integrated environment – the promise of HTAP (Hybrid Transactions and Analytics Platform)

In short, SAP HANA will help ISV’s transform their customers’ environment to ensure they are ready for the core of digital transformation.

Figure 1 – Depicts the implementation of the transaction analytics-continuum in SAP HANA

What about the Cloud?

Moving to the cloud is a major topic on the mind of all our customers, most of whom either have a cloud project underway, or are actively investigating how to make a move to the cloud.   Some of what they are doing is being driven by hype.  However, much of their efforts are driven by the very real benefits that cloud operations bring to their organizations.   End users of applications are challenging ISV’s to simplify their deployments, reduce the administrative overhead, and lower costs.  Let’s take a look at how cloud deployment can help with these demands:

Business Agility – The cloud allows an ISV the ability to quickly develop, deploy and modify applications to/for customers.

Easier and simpler deployments –  Applications for ISV customers can be quickly and inexpensively “spun-up” in a cloud instance, eliminating the need to install and maintain expensive and complex computer infrastructure.  And, perhaps just as importantly – shut down and resources freed/returned to the cloud provider.

Simpler SAP HANA Deployments – No provisioning of SAP HANA hardware is required by the ISV customers.  An SAP HANA instance can be quickly and directly deployed (“spun-up”) into the cloud with the capacity that customers need for all stages of application lifecycle.

Smaller IT Staff – Cloud deployment eliminates or dramatically reduces the need for ISV customers to maintain an IT staff such system, network and database admins.

Capacity on Demand – Sometimes referred to as “Elastic Capacity”.  Providing the ability to scale-up and/or scale-down instances for ISV customers as their requirements change.

Complete Application Lifecycle Support — One of the best features of moving to a cloud strategy is the ability for the cloud to easily support all stages of an application lifecycle: development, test, QA, and production.  All at a much lower cost.  An ISV is no longer required to install and maintain separate, costly infrastructure on premises for each lifecycle stage. Use the cloud to spin up instances when needed.  Release the resources when no longer required. Flexibility, simplicity and cost-reduction – the best of all worlds!

To summarize, Cloud deployment allows an ISV to be more agile with simpler/faster/easier deployments.  All of which leads to a dramatically lower Total-Cost-of-Ownership experience for your customers.

What about specific benefits for ISVs?

I’ve described many of the general benefits that cloud deployment can offer.   Now, let’s dive a little deeper and discuss specifics of how an ISV can utilize the cloud to offer a better customer experience

Self-service – Customers are always looking for easier and simpler acquisition experiences.  By offering a cloud acquisition and deployment model, an ISV can effectively engage in “low-touch” or “no-touch” selling models.  Customers can research, find, acquire and spin-up applications – all with little or no effort by the ISV.  This dramatically lowers the cost of sales.

Try-before-you-Buy – Cloud deployment will allow an ISV to offer “test” or “trial” versions/instances of their applications.  Customers can spin-up an instance in the cloud, and trial the application.

Pay-as-you-Go – By offering a cloud deployment sales model, an ISV can offer customers low initial and recurring costs.  In effect, customers can pay for what they need, when they need it.  Large initial expenditures for software and hardware would no longer be required, making application acquisition (and sales) much easier.

Scalability – The cloud offers an ISV the potential to “right-size” SAP HANA, to meet the application needs that supports a customers current requirements.  Then, as those customer requirements change, the ISV can adjust “on-the-fly” the size of the instance.  Adding or subtracting memory, processors, or even complete SAP HANA nodes can be done easily, and on-the-fly.   Multiple instances, replicated instances, backup instances, active-active disaster recovery scenarios can be quickly and cost-effectively implemented.

Innovation – The flexibility of the cloud will permit an ISV to innovate quicker and easier.  Test and development instances can be created (and released) easily and quickly.   New/innovative customer requirements and scenarios can be quickly prototyped, developed and released – all in the cloud, without the expenditure of a costly on-premises infrastructure.

The Internet-of-Things and the Cloud

One of the most exciting benefits that the cloud brings to an ISV, is the ability to interface with the huge universe of devices producing data.  In other words, the ability to become part of the Internet-of-Things.   IoT is part of almost all customers growth strategy.  In order to be competitive, an ISVs application must be able to integrate into and work in an IoT enabled world.   Cloud deployment can offer an ISV the ability to quickly become part of the IoT environment

Access to IoT Data – In our modern world, everything is producing data.  From the mobile devices we all carry, to our vehicles, factories, smart cities, even our smart homes.   All of this data has value, and will be crucial as we move towards greater use of artificial intelligence such as pattern recognition and machine learning.  SAP HANA provides the ability to connect to the IoT data streams, and ingest the massive volume of data flowing from those streams.   Deploying your application with SAP HANA to the cloud simplifies real-time access to the data.  Making it easy for an ISV to incorporate the data stream into their application.

Huge Data Capability — One of the major problems of living within the IoT world is the huge amount of data produced.   Terabytes to Petabytes and more of data is produced daily that will be needed.  SAP HANA provides the ability to acquire, process and store the huge amount of IoT data.  However, trying to do all this on-premises is difficult and costly.  Deploying to the cloud offers the ability to cost effectively scale SAP HANA processing and storage as data requirements grow.  Far easier and cheaper than trying to scale on-premises.

Cloud Deployment options

As you have read above, Cloud deployment brings significant benefits to ISV’s.  To build upon those benefits and to ensure that ISVs have a wide variety of actual deployment options, SAP has delivered it’s own cloud and built deep relationships with the leading Cloud providers.  This allows ISVs the choice of deployment options that best fits their business model. An ISV has a choice of private, public or hybrid cloud deployment options as depicted in the figure below:

Figure 2 – Cloud Deployment Options

We also provide ISVs with a choice of Cloud platform vendors.  As you can see in the following chart, in addition to our own SAP Cloud Platform, we have partnered with the industry’s leading cloud vendors in order to offer ISVs the best opportunity to find and deploy on the platform that best fits their and their customers business needs and budget.

Figure 3 – Cloud Platform Vendors

How can you get started?

It’s easy to start your cloud journey.  SAP and our cloud partners have created a wealth of easily digestible information on the web.    I’ve outlined a series of steps below, complete with hyperlinks, that will help you learn more about the cloud, and how to engage SAP and our partners to help/guide you on your journey to the cloud.

Learn 

SAP Cloud Platform — To get started, check out our this website for details on SAP’s Cloud Platform.

Partner Cloud Offerings – Learn about the partnerships that SAP has with the leading cloud infrastructure providers.  Follow the links for Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Bluemix Cloud /Platform and Microsoft Azure.

Discover

How other companies are using the cloud: Browse Cloud Success Stories.

Try

Experience the cloud for free and start building your cloud application. Choose your preferred development technology and peruse a wealth of resources and documentation.

Contact Us

Contact us at sap_isv_engagement@sap.com and we will work with you to help determine the cloud strategy and vendor that works best for your unique, individual requirements.

In Summary

By moving to the cloud, ISVs can accelerate the pace of innovation, reduce capital expenditure, take advantage of a simplified IT and get immediate value from the revolutionary SAP HANA in-memory platform.

Cloud development and deployment is right for you if you are ready to learn how to:

• provide a simpler end-customer acquisition/deployment experience
• easily and quickly provide capacity changes due to changing customer requirements
• reduce Total-Cost-of-Ownership

Contact Us

Are you ready to modernize your application platform and simplify your environment developing the next wave of innovation for your customers? We understand that every ISV’s application is unique and has their own set of opportunities. As such, SAP offers multiple ways of partnering on the digital transformation journey and offers services to help ISV’s understand what would be required to adopt SAP HANA and the potential joint business impact.

The time is now to understand how an SAP HANA partnership can drive your transformation to the digital core! To engage with SAP, please either email us at sap_isv_engagement@sap.com or fill out the form below.

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• Specific business cases and technical properties of SAP HANA
• ISV use case’s and examples
• RASP properties of HANA to support ISVs
• Incorporating specialty engines into your application (Real Time Dashboards, Spatial Analytics, Predictive Analytics, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning)